Sunday, March 19, 2023




The hidden cost of sex for women

Katie Jgln often mocks the current heterosexual singles scene. She is bisexual so part of that unhappiness could reasonably be construed as the effect of living in a world into which she does not fit. Normal women might see the situation differently. And I think she misses two major points below.

1). She describes modern-day relationships between the sexes as unequal and oppressive towards women. Most of what she says is probably pretty true in her environment. But it is surely not true of all male/female relationships. There are relationships in which the woman is dominant and some relationships in which men treat women lovingly and considerately.

Negotiation is the secret to getting things right. All human relstionships involve the striking of bargains. They all have to be negotiated in some way. To take a very simple example, a bargain that still exists to this day is one where the wife does most of the housework while the man does various outdoor chores such as taking out the trash.

I am of course neither recommending nor criticising that "bargain". The point is that bargains of that general sort are routinely entered into. Division of labor between men and women goes back deeply into our evolutionary past. And some degree of compromise will be needed for such bargains to be entered into. Large numbers of married couples do succeed in finding agreements that suit them.

So what jiggling Katie is describing is the situation of a woman who has not or cannot find a bargain that suits her. She is far from alone in that. There is much complaint of dating failures

But if individual negotiation cannot deiver a comfortable heterosexual relationship, is there an alternative?

2). There is. What Katie describes is a common modern situation but she appears to miss competely how it all came about. Traditional society once offered a balance of its own. It had all the unequal treatment of women that Katie deplores but it had something else as well. It had ways of treating women which recognized and compensated for inequaity.

I am of course talking about something that feminists fiercely mock: Chivalry towards women. Women did not personally have to negotiate a fair deal with men because men were brought up to believe that they must give women a favourable deal in some ways.

Male violence towards women is a real and great concern for women these days and no-one seems to have found any way of preventing it. The usual hilarious "solution" offered is to tell men to be more like women (!). But violence WAS prevented once -- by the traditional attitude that violence towards women was shameful and a great weakness. Such beliefs were not always effective in protecting women but often they were. Traditional society had answers where the modern world has none.

So the world Katie knows is one where women get treatement that is still unequal but shorn of the protections that once went with it. Feminists took away chivalry and have offered nothing to replace the very important functions it had. Women are much the poorer for that. They still have typical female burdens but none of the support that once went with it.

There are still some men with traditional attitudes. Women would be well advised to seek them out. Feminism has stripped women of important protections and thrown them to the wolves but, fortunately, not all men are wolves. Christians in particular tend to have a traditional orientation

In my notes here about relationships, I often add personal anecdotes by way of illustration of my points. And I am pleased on this occasion to relate that I did personally do very much as recommended above in my own life.

I had a long marriage in which I did nothing about the house while my wife did it all. I seemed to do nothing. Yet at the time she regarded me as the love of her life. Why? What was the bargain involved? What did she get out of it?

Simple. I enabled her to give up work and become a full-time wife and mother. That is about as traditional as it gets. She was also a single mother of three lively kids when I met her so the chance to spend lots of time with her kids was a a huge boon to her. Most mothers want that. I also treated her kids as my own. So a very traditional marriage can be a very good one from the viewpoint of both parties involved.



In an ideal world, hook-up culture would likely work just fine for those who genuinely want to participate in it.

But we clearly aren’t living in one now. At least not yet.

Our society is still saturated with gender inequality, rife with patriarchal double standards and filled with men who are socialised to disrespect and dehumanise women. And all of that, unfortunately, shows up in many aspects of our lives — including hook-ups, relationships and sex in general.

And it’s the reason why there’s a hidden cost of sex for women.

On a societal level, the still existent purity culture implies that women ‘lose’ something while having sex with men, making the social stakes for women to engage in it much higher. Because while for men having a high ‘body count’ is a point of pride, for women, it continues to be a point of shame. And even something that can damage their reputation.

Even if you aren’t religious or don’t subscribe to sexual double standards, you obviously can’t control the fact that many people do and will judge you on it. (Ironically, that often also includes the men who want to sleep with you in the first place.)

Thanks to patriarchal social norms, women also bear most of the financial and health-related costs of birth control. We’re the ones who are expected by our male sex partners — casual or not — to stuff our body with hormones and risk its many side effects, ranging from depression and breast cancer to diabetes.

And then there’s, of course, the fact that depending on where you live, you might not even be able to access it. Or reproductive and sexual health care in general, including emergency contraception and abortions.

Women also face a much greater burden — and more severe health consequences — than men when it comes to getting diagnosed and dealing with sexually transmitted diseases. And it doesn’t exactly help that some straight men — according to some surveys among Millenials, as much as a third — never even got a full STI test, meaning they could be spreading HPV or other infections that rarely cause symptoms without knowing about it.

(Without the HPV vaccine, you might even develop cancer from contracting it. So if you’re a woman who’s never got it and hasn’t done a pap smear in a while, perhaps it’s time to book it now.)

Heterosexual women are also the least likely to orgasm out of… literally everyone else. According to one recent study, while heterosexual men orgasm nearly all the time, and lesbian and bisexual women about 86% and 66% of the time, respectively, heterosexual women only reach orgasms at a 62% rate.

There’s also a far greater taboo around female pleasure than the male one, and both men and women often grow up believing it simply doesn’t matter.

Not to mention that sexual violence and intimate partner violence both affect women disproportionately more than men — according to some global estimates, as many as 1 in 3 women experience it across their lifetime — or that thanks to a myriad of rape culture myths, rape remains one of the least frequently persecuted crimes.

And if all that wasn’t enough, many men now believe that feminism has ‘gone too far’ — in the UK, for instance, half of the young men do — and are being increasingly groomed by violently misogynistic online ‘gurus’ that equate women with…. animals. Or men’s property.

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‘Trad Wives’ Are Triggering Feminists

What started out as a BBC joke/skit wherein working women complain about having to work has blossomed into a trend on TikTok called #tradwife. “Trad wife” is slang for traditional wife (i.e., a stay-at-home wife with kids), and the videos are generally of these women going about their day. Many of them are religious. The more theatrical among this set have chosen to go the extra mile (it is TikTok, after all) and actually dress up like 1950s housewives. And it’s making the radical feminists and the wokesters angry.

How dare these women post about being satisfied being wives and mothers? Women fought hard for the right to work and be outside the home. This trend, to feminists, is like a social contagion that needs to be suppressed at all costs.

What happened to women supporting women? Why are they so threatened?

Here are some thoughts.

Trad Wives Are Great!

By this we mean that traditional wives are great, not necessarily the hashtag trend on TikTok (every trend has its wackos). But here in the real world, society needs women who, if they have the means and inclination, are homemakers. We need women who are cooking, cleaning, and raising children. It is dignified good work.

Not all women have this option. It is very hard to survive financially on one income. Some moms are hybrids who stay at home with children but also work. This is also good and necessary.

Not all women have the inclination or desire to marry. Not all wives are called to have children. That is also okay.

What is ridiculous is that instead of respecting the choices these women have made — a good and societally necessary choice — the screaming masses are tearing these women to shreds.

Critiques of the Trend

It is interesting that the mainstream media have been reacting so strongly to this TikTok trend. The usual mudslinging ensued. This trend is racist, sexist, homophobic, and trans/gender-nonconforming-phobic.

It’s racist, you see, because many of the women in these videos are white. It’s also particularly racist because some of these trad wives dress in 1950s clothing — didn’t you know that during the ‘50s there was Jim Crow and segregation?

Honestly, some of these people need to get off their screens and go outside and touch grass. Being traditional doesn’t mean retrograde. These critics are looking for something sinister in something that simply is not.

It also overlooks the fact that there are plenty of women of color who are also traditional wives. We suppose, though, according to the woke, that adhering to and agreeing with an institution such as heteronormative marriage is akin to being a racist, but you’re still going to have to square that circle.

The sexist accusation is baffling. Can women be sexist against themselves? Leftism is so confusing. On the one hand, they tell us if women/girls don’t act girly enough, we must actually be men. Then when women embrace their femininity in a traditional way, they are raked over the coals for not being like men. Honestly, we can’t win. Perhaps that’s the point of this circular illogic.

According to them, trad wives are homophobes, transphobes, and/or nonbinary-phobes because being in a traditional nuclear marriage (one man, one woman) is bad.

Conversely, being in a monogamous traditional marriage is fulfilling a purpose — family and security — and is satisfying to both partners.

The Tell That #Tradwife Is Actually on to Something

The fact that these radical feminists and leftists are reacting so strongly to this TikTok trend is a tell that the trad wives might be on to something.

Perhaps these women looked too happy. Because “traditionalism when it comes to homemaking has a particular magic to it that seems fulfilling,” argues political analyst Brandon Morse. “Men love being breadwinners and having loving, caring wives. Women want to feel safe, provided for, and admired.”

Perhaps these women’s choices threaten the Left because they’re subversive to the woke rhetoric, upholding the institution of marriage and family at the most basic units. Being a wife, mother, and homemaker throws a wrench into the works of this ideological takeover. If a wife is at home carrying out everyday duties, she might notice if something awful comes home from her child’s school (like a pornographic book from the library). She might not be as reliant on convenience items and instead she might garden, bake, create, and sew. She might even be teaching her children to be religious like herself. This, of course, is probably the greatest threat.

Being a religious wife and mother in a committed marriage is now an act of extraordinary courage. Sharing it on TikTok is an act of rebellion to the woke.

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Leftist agitators in Fascist black

About 100 protesters at the University of California, Davis, surrounded a venue attempting to disrupt an event Tuesday evening headlined by conservative personality and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. The event was organized by the school’s Turning Point chapter.

The protesters, who were mostly wearing black, clashed with law enforcement officers and other students, including attendees of the event, as they smashed windows, hurled eggs, used pepper spray and blocked people from entering the University Credit Union Center, where the event was held.

There were at least two arrests.

"Not a peaceful protest at all," Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted after photos and videos of the protest surfaced on social media.

Several people responded to Musk's post agreeing the protesters were violent and some made comparisons to the Jan. 6 Capitol protest.

UC Davis said in a statement after the event that one police officer was injured during the incident.

"Outside the UCUC, about 100 protesters gathered and for brief times blocked the main event entrance and the pathway to the entrance," the school said, admitting there were "minor incidents."

It added: "One officer sustained an injury when he was jumped on from behind and pushed to the ground, and two people were arrested and taken to Yolo County Jail for allegedly painting graffiti on an exterior wall of the University Credit Union Center, or UCUC, where the event was held."

The school also said protesters near the northeast entrance broke 10 glass window panes in the doors. Protesters did not gain access to the building, however, and eventually left the area.

There were no arrests related to the breaking of the glass, the school said.

The protesters held signs supporting trans and queer people and had umbrellas that they used primarily to cover their identities, videos and photos taken at the school show.

Other protesters threw eggs and other objects.

"There were some reports of people being pepper sprayed by others in the crowd. Aside from these pepper spray reports, no major physical injuries were reported and no one requested treatment for injuries," UC Davis said.

The protesters also physically blocked a bike path and made entry more difficult for others.

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Our Christophobic Ruling Caste

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley last week persistently questioned Attorney General Merrick Garland about the FBI’s over-reaction last September in its heavily armed arrest of pro-life Catholic Mark Houck at his home––for an alleged assault that local law enforcement had already declined to prosecute. Houck was tried, and a jury acquitted him in just an hour.

For citizens of faith, the raid and trial demonstrate how many “public servants” in our federal agencies have an animus against Christians, a peculiarity given that the DOJ and other agencies are so vigorous in protecting Muslims from alleged Islamophobic persecution. Christophobia, on the other hand, apparently is okay, and Christians’ First Amendment rights can be violated to serve partisan political agendas.

Once again, the self-styled “brights,” the technocratic, progressive ruling elite who “follow the science,” are abusing their power to intimidate and marginalize Christians while violating their 1st and 14th Amendment rights in order to discredit Christianity, long a threat to the technocracy and its authority.

The Houck case is not an outlier in the Feds’ sorry record of targeting Christians. In January there surfaced an FBI field office’s report called “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities,” which was disavowed only after an FBI whistleblower exposed it.

Or consider the FBI’s double standards in pursuing attacks on reproductive services offices, which are violations of the FACE Act used to charge Houck. According to the Heritage Foundation, “The DOJ charged 26 pro-life activists with FACE Act violations in 2022 alone, but did not charge a single pro-abortion activist with FACE Act charges in 2022, despite over 100 apparent pro-abortion attacks on pro-life pregnancy centers and churches across the nation, according to Catholic Vote trackers.”

Nor is this a recent development. During the Obama administration, starting in 2010 the IRS targeted conservative and Christian non-profits. Losing a subsequent lawsuit did not slow the IRS down. In 2021, the agency pulled a Texas prayer group’s tax-exempt status because it “benefits Republicans.” As Ohio Senator Jim Jordan commented, “The Obama/Biden IRS targeted conservatives for their political beliefs. It looks like the Biden/Harris IRS is already up to no good as well. Every American should be concerned, but sadly, not surprised.”

This disdain for Christianity has been intensifying for a century, and goes back even farther to the 18th century Enlightenment. When not atheists, many of the new rationalists were Deists, reducing God to the “first mover” responsible for the created world. The theology of Christ’s divinity, incarnation, death, and resurrection, and the miracles attending Christ’s mission, was rejected. Christians, when not decried as tyrannical, intolerant instigators of slaughter, were patronized as “shamans or witch doctors from savage tribes whom one humors until one can dress them in trousers and send them to school,” as Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz satirized this attitude.

By 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche memorably expressed this new sensibility and its cause: “Wither is God?” the madman in a fable asks. “I will tell you. We have killed him––you and I. All of us are his murderers . . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” The only question left is, what will take God’s place as the foundational source of our ideals like virtue or human rights, if these can even survive.

The progress of science and the new technologies that followed, and the spread of political structures like political freedom and equality, human rights, and social justice gave one answer: The new authority of science based on its material improvements changed radically human existence, and disproved the Christian doctrine of mankind’s innate corruptibility. The dream of endless progress brought on by education and scientific new knowledge, took hold and started the long process of secularization. The new knowledge and “human sciences” could now improve human nature and usher in an age freed from the destructive behaviors that once blighted human life.

It didn’t take long for that dream to become a nightmare. Yet not even the 20th century’s gruesome catalogue of industrialized slaughter, genocide, and gulags written by political religions like fascism, Nazim, and communism has weakened this faith among our cognitive elites.

For Americans in particular, this growing authority of science and distaste for religion began to erode the 1st Amendment’s rights of free speech and religion. The provision was distorted to mean a “wall of separation of church and state,” a phrase created by Thomas Jefferson. The “establishment clause” proscribed a church established the federal government with authority over the whole nation, like England’s Anglican Church. State-level established churches already existing in many states were left alone. Now they are forbidden by Supreme Court rulings that extended the 1st and 14th amendments to the states.

Today this misreading of the Constitution has been used to justify banning any public connection of politics to religion, which of course violates the 1st Amendment’s freedom of religion and speech. But this unwarranted interpretation conflicts with the thinking of the Founders about the viability of the Constitution’s freedoms given the destructive “passions and interests” and lust for power that all humans are prey to.

As John Adams expressed this importance of religion for the new nation’s success in his 1798 “Letter from John Adams to Massachusetts Militia”:

“Because we have no government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by Morality and Religion, Avarice, Ambition, Revenge, or Gallantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Indeed, even atheists like Voltaire acknowledged the utilitarian value of religion in his famous quips, “If God didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him,” and “God is dead, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.” Or as Napoleon put it, “Religion is a kind of vaccination, which, by satisfying our natural love for the marvelous, keeps us out of the hands of charlatans and conjurers. The priests are better than the Cagliostros [famous occultists and frauds, Andrew Roberts’s gloss], the Kants, and all the visionaries of Germany.”

As advanced materially as we are, as successful as our science has been at unlocking the secrets of nature and using its powers to create life-changing technologies, our science still can’t give us an answer to the question why we shouldn’t just follow our impulses and appetites, no matter how evil. Instead, it falls back on dubious Darwinism like the “God gene,” or various forms of determinism like Freudianism or Marxism, both of which have been dead-ends in the attempt to find a substitute for God. At least Nietzsche was honest, acknowledging that God’s death has undercut all our virtues like charity and empathy for our fellow humans that make us humane rather than just clever chimps.

Finally, the discrediting of faith and the idealization of science as the royal road to ultimate happiness on earth, has created an emptiness in our civilization, which lacks a convincing story of who we are and what is best for us, how we should live and act, what is good for us and what we are good for.

Into that void have stepped cults and political religions like Marxism, which has co-opted much of Christian salvation theology. Only now, original sin is called the “alienation” of people from nature, their fellow man, and their labor, a fallen condition that the abolishing of capitalism and private property will redeemed. And the “born-again” Christian will be the “new man” communism creates through revolution, inheritors of a new “salvation” here on earth––“a higher sociobiological type, a superman . . . . Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, more subtle,” as Leon Trotsky preached. As the Catholic thinker Andre de Lubac asked, “On which side are the miracles greater?”

We know the cost of this low-rent religion––100 million killed by famine, torture, gulags, and mass murder. Yet still the Left promotes the false knowledge about people and their natures that contributed to such carnage and cruelty. The history of communism alone answers the question that Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov raises: whether “without God and immortal life . . . all things are permitted.”

Yet science still has not been able to give a convincing answer to that question, as all around us belief in more and more secular “miracles” proliferate.

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BLM Movement Received $82.9 Billion From Corporations - Is This the Most Lucrative Shakedown in History?

In what could be considered the most lucrative shakedown of all time the Black Lives Movement has extorted received over $82.9 billion from corporations as Breitbart reports:

“The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and related causes received an astonishing $82.9 billion from corporations, a new funding database from the Claremont Institute has found.

The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life explained the necessity of their report in an article published in Newsweek, where the Center asserted that the 2020 BLM movement was about more than just “rioting and destruction.”

The Center explained that “The BLM pressure campaigns, harassment, and moral blackmail also amounted to possibly the most lucrative shakedown of corporate America in its history.”

“As a point of reference, $82.9 billion is more than the GDP of 46 African countries. In 2022, the Ford Motor Company’s profits were $23 billion,” they also noted. The sum of $82.9 million includes “more than $123 million to the BLM parent organizations directly,” as well as much more to other organizations supporting BLM’s agenda.

The list reveals that several popular corporations from a wide range of different industries supplied the movement with large sums of cash. Walmart, for example, which is based in Arkansas, gave a whopping $100 million in support of BLM and related causes focusing on “racial equity.” Amazon gave even more, supplying the movement with an astonishing $169.5 million. Silicon Valley Bank gave the movement $73.45 million.”

Have to admit the people who are running the Black Lives Matter movement are brilliant at raising money from corporations and from government entities as well.

Who knew asking corporations for free money to support a racist and hate filled organization would generate billions and billions in donations?

We also know that several of it’s former leaders have been caught with their hands in the cookie jar as well.

“Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors is stepping down as executive director of the organization amid controversy over her $3 million property portfolio.

Cullors, who has been at the helm of the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation for nearly six years, announced the news on Thursday.

The 37-year-old activist told The Associated Press that she is leaving to focus on other projects, including the upcoming release of her second book and a multi-year TV development deal with Warner Bros.”

Guess when there is that much money floating around there is bound to be some level of corruption, especially when the thing is being run by leftists.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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